"How much do you know about brewing beer?," Bell's Brewer Steve Buszka asks cheerfully enough. But his face darkens a bit for his next and more serious inquiry: "You do drink beer, don't you?"
In 1985, Bell's owner Larry Bell, whose home-brewed beer was already making cultured palates water all over the area, opted to try his hand at a little professional brewing. Armed with four employees and small-scale brewing equipment including boilers, storage drums, pressure gauges, bottling equipment and the like, Bell inked a lease to house his operations in a pair of ramshackle Kalamazoo warehouses surrounded by little more than forgotten industrial wasteland.
Today, while dingy trains still thunder by the brewery, Bell's has become a kind of crowded campus of busy buildings. Complete with a bar and outdoor beer garden, the brewery features an array of cluttered buildings where 40-plus employees and enormous pieces of machinery team up to brew enough beer to fill thousands of kegs and hundreds of thousands of bottles every month.
"Microbreweries have caught on and become a very big deal recently," Buszka admits. "We were a bit ahead of our time over here."
Bell says that even though the market may now be crowded with small breweries looking to cash in - business is still booming.
"Microbrew sales have slowed since a few years ago, but we're still going strong with a growth rate last year of 15 or 20 percent," he said. "We used to grow at 59 percent but you can't grow that much every year."
| Sept. 17: Beer for Thought |
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| What: Bell's Brewery |
| Where: 355 Kalamazoo Ave., Kalamazoo |
| How: Take I-94 West to exit 81, follow the 94 Business Loop to Kalamazoo Avenue. The brewery is on the left at the corner of Kalamazoo Ave. and Porter Street, under a prominent Bell's billboard. |
| How Long: 1 hour, 45 minutes |
| What's there: Bell's sells to-go bottles and kegs of micro-brewed beer seven days a week, Monday-Thursday 10 a.m.-11:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 12:30 a.m. The brewery also features an on-premises lounge and beer garden open until 2 a.m., and also provides guided tours of its facilities on Saturdays at 1, 2, and 3 p.m. Bell's features live music both indoors and outside through out the year on Friday and Saturday nights. Cover usually runs between $4-8. Call (616) 382-2332 for details. |
After about two days the contents of the vats have assumed a more beer-like color, but the process is still not quite finished.
"We bottle all of our beer flat," Buszka explains. "We add sugar to the mix so that carbonation occurs in the bottle or the keg."
Buszka said the beer sits in 42-degree concrete storage caverns for 10 days, then each keg and case is checked for pressure before it is sold on-site or trucked away. "We get to poke every keg to make sure the pressure's OK - that's always a lot of fun," he added.
As well as teaching visitors how a bag of grains transforms into mountains of chilled silver kegs and box after simple brown box of beer, the brewery also provides those who turn up the opportunity to try beer unavailable anywhere else.
"The people in the bar are our guinea pigs," Buszka explains. "With new recipes we usually brew about four kegs worth. If the employees like it, we sell it in the bar. If the customers like it, it may turn up in stores one day."
Buszka said Bell's currently sports about 40 different beer recipes, all of which have been or will be available in the brewery's bar. The company sells about 30 percent of its beer in the Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids area, another 30 percent to students in Ann Arbor and customers in Detroit and another third to beer enthusiasts in the Chicago area. The remaining beer is shuttled to parts of Northern Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. Bell's Amber Ale currently outsells its micro-brewed brothers - "about every other brew" Bell's produces on a daily basis is Amber Ale, Buszka explained.
Yearly the company sells some 20,000 kegs and 140,000 cases of beer.
"We have college kids in here all the time buying our kegs," says bartender Rob Rostar, who recommends a glass of Bell's thick and hoppy Stout. "We can't really give much of a discount here, but they know they are getting a superior product."
Outside the comfortable, well-worn red brick bar, with its checkerboard tables and sparse decoration, is an enclosed outdoor patio that easily holds 700 people and is known lovingly as the "Beer Garden." A covered stage, nestled under rows of sprawling hops vines, hosts many local acts who are attracted to the venue by the promise of all the good beer they can drink. Last weekend, local blues-stand-out Robert Bradley entertained close to 1,000 beer-sippers.
"We have a good time out here," Buszka explains. "It's worth the trip if you just want to hang out, or if you're looking to take some beer home with you."
And Buszka says students need not worry about the hour-and-one-half jaunt back from the brewery running over the taste of beer sold cold.
"A beer only really gets skunked because of sunlight," he explains. "Unless the beer goes from like 30 degrees up to 150 degrees the temperature really won't affect the taste. If the beer's in your trunk, it's fine."
If skunking the beer isn't a concern the only thing that may be left to worry about may be a speeding ticket.
09-17-98
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